


On the Building of Home

by sister_dear



Series: How to Thrive in a Radioactive Wasteland [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Brotherhood of Steel - Freeform, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Slice of Life, Spoilers, Team as Family, as well as Danse's personal quest, for the Brotherhood of Steel ending specifically, slight implication of self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 01:13:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5987203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sister_dear/pseuds/sister_dear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The doghouse is a ramshackle thing, made of old wooden palettes pried apart and reassembled to the tune of three bruised fingertips and a great deal of cursing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Building of Home

“There. What do you think, Dogmeat?”

The doghouse is a ramshackle thing, made of old wooden palettes pried apart and reassembled to the tune of three bruised fingertips and a great deal of cursing. It certainly isn’t waterproof, or even entirely windproof, which is why it’s situated under the overhand of the Red Rocket, where it will have at least a little added shelter.

Dogmeat whines, tail working uncertainly, but is willing enough to investigate when she chucks his teddy bear and a piece of meat inside.

Lavender leaves him to it, goes inside to roll out her own accommodations; an old sleeping bag, the least rotten one she’s managed to find. She doesn’t need anything else. The building is in surprisingly good shape, concrete and steel weathering the years far better than the clapboard siding of most of the actual houses, and she refuses to put too much work into a place she’ll likely not be spending much time in anyway.

Lavender is going to kill the man who’d murdered her husband. Her only goal. People with vendettas like hers don’t tend to live long.

Best not get too attached.

-

She’s not sure Nick sleeps. He may not even want to stay here. There is still a business waiting for him in Diamond City, after they find the people who killed her husband. She unrolls a second sleeping bag in the little office anyway.

-

Lavender doesn’t like to visit Sanctuary. The memory of it, of the elevator grinding to a halt and her heart going shocky still in her chest, one final blow in a day far too full of them, sends a stab of grief through her even now. Two hundred years, but to her it seemed like only an hour, maybe two, since she and Nate bolted from their home with nothing but the clothes on their backs. (She doesn’t even have those any more; she searched every locker, but the only clothing left in Vault 111 is being worn by dead people. Her suit reeked of stale air and something cold and biting and rancid, of a corpse just starting to thaw. She dumped it the moment she found something that didn’t disintegrate beneath her fingers, looted out of an abandoned cabin.) (The cabin also contained a corpse, but at least this one she didn’t recognize.)

On that first awful day, with the horror eeling fresh beneath her skin so that she scratched her nails hard down her own forearms, pulled at her hair when the thick vault suit got in the way of the pain, she skirted around Sanctuary entirely. She had to do something to keep from just curling up into a ball and screaming herself hoarse. (That came later. In the cave under the Red Rocket, mole rat blood cooling on her hands, she screamed until she cried, until the grief subsided to the rage, morphed into an emotion that woke her from the shocked daze of just keep moving, just find food, just find shelter.)

So she actively avoids Sanctuary. Hadn’t stepped foot in the place until Preston and his people wanted to settle there. She made sure they had what they needed and fled. Her losses press in on her harshly enough without their skeletal remains standing over her as she sleeps.

-

She scans the sky for jet trails, an old habit, has to remind herself that they won’t be there.

-

Danse doesn’t stay at the Red Rocket. At first, because she doesn’t want him meeting Nick. Then, because she doesn’t trust him alone with Nick. He stays at the police station, later in private quarters aboard the Prydwen. She goes to him when they need to travel together, Nick sometimes accompanying her most of the way before breaking off to Diamond City.

Helping the Brotherhood is initially nothing but a distraction; mowing down monsters and murderers a balm to the fury that rages in the back of her mind, against the Commonwealth, against this place that has taken all she had left, scapegoats for all the ways the world has wronged her. Later it will be a way to get inside the Institute, to get to her son. (Possibly, impossibly, still alive.) For now it is simply easier to commit these atrocities in the name of helping people.

She disagrees with their stubbornly narrow stance on synths, though. Nick’s stoic silences and firecracker repartees are far too real for him to not be a person.

-

Nick does not, in fact, sleep. He sits, long brooding silences spent smoking cigarettes that do nothing for him, or he tinkers, or he wanders the perimeter of the Rocket with hands stuffed in pockets and eyes watchfully on the horizon. He likes to sit at the office terminal but always gets up to leave when it’s time for Lavender to turn in. “It’s all right.” She says. “I don’t mind.” She says. “We stay closer than this when we’re on the road.” She says. He still leaves more often than not. She tells herself it’s his choice but still finds herself thinking that the only other place to sit is the battered pair of chairs set up out by the road; good sight lines, but fully exposed to the weather. It makes her feel guilty, which never improves her already short temper.

So another chair appears at the Red Rocket. An old thing with stained orange cushions and a wooden frame she has to reinforce before she trusts it to hold the weight of a metal man, skinny though he may be. She pushes it up against the outer wall, sheltered from sun and rain but still with a view up towards Sanctuary. And then a sagging couch on the other side of Dogmeat’s house, complete with moldy area rug and a little side table. All of it is dragged across the bridge from Sanctuary with the help of Sturgis, disgustingly good natured as ever and more than willing to do a little heavy lifting in exchange for a chance to explore the truck stop.

All battered, ugly, scavenged from the houses of people she’d known only in passing. Nothing that meant anything to her personally. Nothing she couldn’t leave behind.

-

Dogmeat takes Nick’s sleeping bag. She tries to stop him, but he likes to stay outside with Nick well into the night and then sneak in after she’s asleep. She gives up after waking one night to the sound of rustling right next to her. Nick, actually tucking the furball in. “Goodnight, pal,” he mutters, affection clear even past the customary gruff tone. Dogmeat’s tail thumps happily, swish-swishing across the sleeping bag. Lavender cracks her eyes open just long enough to see Nick pulling out his chair by the computer terminal, tracking the pale blur of his trench coat in the darkness, the flash of his yellow eyes. She closes her own before he catches her looking, afraid of what he’ll read of her expression staring back at him in the blackest hours of the night, and forces herself back to sleep.

-

Lavender kills Kellogg. The vicious satisfaction at justice served flashes through her like brushfire, there and then gone as quickly as it came, leaving only ash to mark it had been at all. She snaps at Nick and then at Dogmeat, knows she should be sorry but isn’t, selfish in her grief.

-

She installs several turrets on the roof. Something productive to do that doesn’t involve alienating the two people (Well. Metal person and dog.) she quite possibly owes the most.

“Your parents should have named you Thistle,” Nate liked to joke. “Or even Rose. My prickly brier patch.”

She isn’t going to come home to find that her life has been ripped out from under her again. She just isn’t.

-

There are new shapes in the sky. They don’t leave jet trails, but they are dangerous all the same. The Brotherhood has come to the Commonwealth. She ignores Danse’s summons until she can’t.

-

“Danse,” she says, slowly, cautiously, watching the way the super mutant blood trails off of her hands, how the ocean carries it off towards the horizon. “There’s someone I think you need to meet.”

“Finally going to introduce me to the synth?”

“I - what? How did you-?”

“I lead a recon team. You know that.”

She wants to punch his perfect face in, or at least deliver a solid slap with the back of her armored hand to that solid chest place just to hear the violence of metal on metal. Knows he wouldn’t take it well at all, and manages to rein herself in to a snarl and some agitated pacing instead. Danse watches her in silence.

Well then. She squares her shoulders, flashes a smile that’s all teeth. “Since you already know who you’re meeting, we can skip to the end; Nick has helped me quite a bit, and I trust him. I expect you to be polite.”

She’s watching him closely, but his expression doesn’t change.

“After you.”

-

She pays MacCready 250 caps for his services, money well spent. The desk and its terminal in the little office are shoved outside to make room for a third sleeping bag, terminal sparking ominously when she unplugs it and trailing wires like ripped intestines. Nick’s chair remains.

-

She and Danse find an honest-to-God pool table on one of their patrols through an old apartment building. It even has most of the equipment.

Danse bitches the entire way about the resources they are wasting, but with two suits of power armor dedicated to the task, moving the table up the road goes surprisingly smoothly. Lavender surveys it in it’s new spot under the (admittedly now a bit crowded) overhang with a kind of accomplished pride that she hasn’t felt since she and Nate hosted their first - last - Thanksgiving Dinner.

-

MacCready is the only one willing to work the vegetable garden. He complains the entire time, but when Lavender wants to find him it’s one of the first places she looks. The second is the roof. He likes to sit up there with the turrets, drink in hand and rifle across his knees, adding his eyes to their ever watchful presence.

Lavender spends two days hauling wood scrap up the steep steps. It’s hard, heavy work, but by the end there is a small lean-to, open of all sides so as not to obstruct any sight lines but providing just enough shelter that a man too stubborn for his own good can stay up there all day and still not be entirely exposed to the elements.

-

Danse is, against all odds, still alive. He needs space, some time to come to terms with all that has happened. Lavender knows that feeling intimately.

MacCready catches her shuffling sleeping bags around to make room for one more. “You really sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She’ll give Danse two days before dragging him home to the truck stop, power armor or no.

-

Lavender reaches the Institute. Meets her son, and sorely wishes that she hadn’t.

She should check in with the Brotherhood. They’ll be wondering what happened, expecting information. She stays near the truck stop for days. Finds herself checking the sky so often that MacCready finally comments on it. There are the distant sounds of Vertibird rotors and gunfire, but never any jet trails.

-

Lavender travels with MacCready more often now that Danse is persona non grata with the Brotherhood. She still worries about leaving Nick and Danse alone, until the morning she steps outside and sees them together, chairs pulled just close enough for conversation. Danse is out of his armor, a more and more frequent occurrence. Nick has his screwdriver out, performing the frequent maintenance his exposed hand requires. Danse seems to be asking him something about the process, if the way Nick angles his hand so that Danse can more clearly see is any indication. She can only catch brief glimpses of their faces; they are turned toward the road, and their body language is wary. But Danse’s voice has the slightly hesitant lilt it takes when he is stepping out of his comfort zone, and Nick’s lacks any of the bite of true irritation. No stranger would mistake them for friends. Lavender feels the faintest stirrings of hope all the same.

-

Four sleeping bags, plus Nick’s chair. The little office is growing uncomfortably crowded.

Lavender contemplates a solution to this problem as she leans back against the chem station, arms crossed, scowling at the rusted remains of a truck and other rubbish currently taking up most of what would otherwise be a relatively large area of clear, flat space.

It will take work, lots of it. Materials, but they have plenty. A bit of planning.

Don’t get too attached to this place, Lavender. You never know when you might just have to up and leave.

She straightens, goes to round up her boys.

-

The finished shack is truly ugly. By necessity long and narrow, a mis-mash of scavenged wood and corroded steel. They move the pool table inside before finishing off the walls, since it won’t fit through the door. An actual dining table, fetched from Sanctuary by Nick and Danse, and more than enough room for four sleeping bags and an office chair.

Not that long ago she would have looked at it and thought it a dilapidated barn at best. Now, though. There is a warm bloom beginning to sooth over her ragged edges despite her best intentions.

-

The Brotherhood storms the Institute.

(People with vendettas like hers shouldn’t plan for a future.)

Lavender presses the button. Lavender kills the man who would have been her son.

-

The classical radio station plays only static. She flips it off. The sudden silence echoes the hollow feeling in her chest.

Except… it isn’t silent, not really. The turrets on the roof still chug away, the generator drones on out back. There is still the steady clanking of Danse patrolling the perimeter, there is Nick talking to Dogmeat, there a loud exclamation abruptly cut off as MacCready stops himself from cursing. When had these sounds taken up the place in her mind that expected Shaun crying, dishes clinking, the newscaster on the TV? When had these sounds stopped representing a hellish nightmare and instead started to feel like home?

She steps outside, scans the sky, but she isn’t looking for jet trails that won’t be there. She’s just enjoying the view.


End file.
